In the High Pyrenees: A New Life in a Mountain Village

by Bernard Loughlin (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2003

  $3.25

  This is a loving and funny account of life in a mountain village in the Catalan Pyranees and of Bernard and Mary Loughlins' efforts to restore an ancient house there. The text tells of the life of the village, the mountains and how the two struggled to overcome the ghosts of their Irish past.

• Used

  Paperback
  2004

  $4.19

  On the day after the death of Franco, Bernard Loughlin made his first visit to Farrera, a village in the Catalan Pyrenees. There, in a chilly seventeenth-century church, he and his Belfast sweetheart, Mary, were married; and there, by candlelight, Mary gave birth to their first child. Bernard and Mary spent the next two decades in Ireland, running the artists' retreat at Annaghmakerrig. When they left in 1999, under the shadow of a terrible crime committed by a neighbour against their children, their destination was Farrera. They were starting a new life. In the High Pyrenees is a loving and often hilarious account of the smells, sensations and neighbourly intrigues of a mountain village. In gorgeous, vivid prose, Bernard Loughlin tells the many stories of this out-of-the-way place, where a varied cast of outsiders live alongside a handful of remaining Catalan peasants and their modernizing offspring. This is a tale of struggles - to restore an old house and garden on a vertiginous mountainside; to wangle a mortgage from sceptical Catalan bankers; to start a business; to overcome the ghosts of the Loughlins' Irish past. And it is a story of joy - in the warmth of village hospitality, in the spectacular Pyrenees landscape, and in the Loughlins' growing certainty that this extraordinary place is home.